The Gorn have always been protrayed as being heavy, ponderous, slow, and damn near indestructable when it comes to their vessels. ST had never really shown a Gorn ship...actully I don't think any of the episodes from any of the series ever showed a Gorn ship (yes...there was the revamped Gorn in the Mirror episodes from ENTERPRISE, but never a ship).

The first time anyone ever really saw a Gorn ship was in the board RPg game by FASA called the Starship Combat Simulator. The Gorn ships were bulky, blocky, and like their species, ugly. There there was Interplay's Starfleet Command series (but not the TNG version) that presented the Gorn as still slow and ponderous, but heavily armed, heavily armored, and about a fast as a slug on crack. You could dance circles around one of the heavies, but heaven helpyou if you ever got caught in the sights of a bank of three fully charged plasma torpedo launchers.

Yeah...pretty much sucking vaccume on that one.

Then there are the various pod and strut designs that floated around.

I saw that ASR was lacking in it's own unique look for the Gorn. We actually have two variants of the Gorn: The Gorn Hegomony (the bad Gorn), and the Gorn Confederation (the Gorn who aren't really bad, but you can't really trust them). The ships they use are thesame, much like the Klingon vessels seen within ASR's fractured Klingon Empire, though this is more recent.

I liked the SFC versins of the Gorn ships. While they were bulkly and slow, they still screamed GORN! I also likedthe Narn battlecruiser seenin B5. So, I took aspects from those designs as well as many teakings and ideas of my own and created a Destroyer Escort(DE), a Frigate(FF), a Destroyer(DD), a Light Cruiser(CL), and a Heavy Cruiser(CA). There is presently a Gorn Battlecruiser and a Dreadnought hull in the works.

Also...ASR chose to name the Gorn ship classes after dinosaurs. I took it a little bit further and named them after the dinosaur family names. The only one not falling in that ctegory was the one featured here: The PTERODACTYL.

The PTEODACTYLis the smallest vessel in either one of the Gorn inventories. She, however, is slightly larger than the largest DE in Starfleet's line up and would probably class as a Frigate or small Destroyer. But...she's nimble. Yeah...can't usually use those two words together when describing a Gorn ship. The Gorn engineers decided to drop some of the mass by creating a smaller vessel with lighter armor and fewer weapons. The result is a DE that can and has given larger destroyers a run for their money.

One of the things I id was expand on the Gorn pictographic langauge. I had found a few charactors, butnot the whole alphabet. So I finished it and created it, a numeral system and a font of thier langauge as it would appear on a computer display.

The next several spotlights will be featured the Gorn and then I get to move on to another one of those races that didn't get a lot of play...until ENTERPRISE: the Tholians

Enjoy!

The Rider